Advanced routing between Pro Tools and the NI Maschine plugin

[LW4EVER123]

Hi everyone,

maybe you thought about this too sometime:
I really like the quality of the samples and instruments presets that you get when buying NI Maschine. But working in Pro Tools together with the Maschine plugin is in my opinion not that great. In some ways it is as if you would be working in two DAW's at the same time. But they are not really linked.

So what I am trying to do is this:
I want to use my Maschine Mikro Controller in MIDI mode to record onto a Pro Tools MIDI track. The individual notes of the MIDI track should then be sent to the corresponding tracks inside of Maschine.

To clarify this with an example:
The pad #1 on the controller is usually mapped to be triggering the Kick Drum (inside of the Maschine software). In MIDI mode this could be e.g. the note C1 (inside of Pro Tools).
Pad #2 would be the snare. The MIDI note would be C#1.
So I would like to be able to trigger the "Kick Drum track" within Maschine only when the C1 is being played.


I was thinking about filtering out the individual MIDI notes (I have not found a solution for this yet). And after that I could just send them to another MIDI track. There transpose them back to C3 so the sound of e.g. the Kick Drum does not get pitched (no problem in Pro Tools with Real-Time-Properties). Then simply send it to the corresponding Maschine track (easy routing as well).

Do you have any ideas on how to "filter" the notes out and route them to individual tracks? Is there maybe a plugin for it?


Thanks in advance!

[LW4EVER123]

If anyone is interested I just found the solution myself:

- within the NI Controller Editor patch/assign every pad to another MIDI channel. You got 16 to choose from - the number of pads you have on the Maschine controller.

- set every note of every pad to "C3" so there will not be any pitching issues later on.

- in Pro Tools create one MIDI track for each pad you like to use. If you want to be able to trigger the whole drum group inside of Maschine create 16 MIDI tracks.

- set the MIDI-inputs of the tracks in an ascending order from Maschine channel 1 to channel 16.

- set the outputs to Maschine MIDI in from 1 to 16 as well.

- within the Maschine plugin you can set the MIDI input channel for each sound. These correspond to the MIDI output channels from the step before.

- to record arm all MIDI tracks in Pro Tools simply shift-click their record buttons.


Now all 16 MIDI channels for Maschine are used. But you can only use the drums with Maschine. To solve that you can easily just create another track (audio or instrument) with another instance of the Maschine plugin inserted.


So now you have the Maschine sounds with the layout of Pro Tools linked.